Your 2012 climate change scorecard

By Philip BumpAs our friends at 350.org like to remind us, climate change really comes down to math. Put x amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, see y degrees of warming. Our goal — meaning, our goal as an evolved, aware species that would rather not be plagued by droughts and megastorms and constant flooding and armed conflict — is to reduce how much carbon dioxide we’re putting into the atmosphere each year instead of continually increasing the amount.We’re not good at this. And time is running very low: We either need massive, quick action or it’s too late.

Given that this particular year is nearing its end, we decided to figure out how the math for 2012 stacked up. Did we, on balance, change our ways so that our net greenhouse gas emissions declined, or did we yet again increase how much we’re polluting? Are we running in the positive or the negative or what?

Effect on climate pollution: -2Methodology for this: I picked a number between -10 (leads to reduction in pollution; good) and 10 (increases it; bad). Want to fight about it?

• Australia implemented a carbon tax.
It’s fairly modest, to be sure, and highly contentious, but still counts as one of the year’s strongest efforts to curtail climate change pollution. (If that provides any insight into how this scorecard is going to go.)

• The EPA also announced a new, higher fuel-efficiency standard for cars and trucks.
The 54.5 miles-per-gallon standard will be mandatory by 2025 — an improvement that could drop oil consumption by 12 billion barrels.

Effect on climate pollution: -5

• California auctioned carbon allowances as the first step in its cap-and-trade program.
Even though the first auction itself didn’t go that well, that the largest state will begin regulating carbon pollution on Jan. 1, 2013, is important, and could — slowly — further reduce output of CO2 in the U.S.

• China and the E.U. are working together on an emissions strategy.
China will develop an emissions trading scheme with the E.U.’s help, potentially then linking its carbon market to Europe’s. The bigger the market, the more efficient — and the more likely that we can curb carbon emissions more broadly.

Effect on climate pollution: -2

• The U.S. invests in an effort to target small-scale emissions across the world.
The innovative program, announced in March, targets pollutants like black carbon and methane by providing improvements on existing tools already in broad use. Think: cleaner cookstoves.

• The United Nations did nothing.Fifty thousand people met in Rio; who-knows-how-many traveled to Qatar. And that all resulted in a vague promise to maybe do something in 2013. The U.N.’s ability to mandate change is certainly limited, but that it didn’t mandate any at an enormously critical time is not just incompetent, it’s immoral.

Oh, also? The big U.N. climate report due in 2013 was leaked early. But more importantly, it won’t address permafrost melt, one of the biggest negative feedbacks in the warming cycle. Meaning that if the U.N. ever actually does take action, it will be taking action on overly optimistic information.

Effect on climate pollution: 8

• The presidential campaign was all about how great coal is.
As the U.S. decided who it wanted to lead the country for the next four years, the options with which it was presented failed to suggest that they’d lead on the critical issue of climate. Both Romney and Obama French-kissed the coal industry for an extended period of time, which was as ugly as that image makes it sound.

• Coal use may be dying in the U.S., but overseas, business is booming.
A recent report from the International Energy Administration suggested that by 2017, coal would pass oil as an energy source. By that year, the world will be producing another 3.4 billion tons of CO2 from coal alone over what we’re producing now. Why? Well, the World Resources Institute suggests that the world has 1,200 new coal plants in the pipeline.

• Obama gave the thumbs-up to a key stretch of the Keystone pipeline.
That stretch of pipeline being built in Texas that’s causing all the brouhaha? It was OK’d by President Obama. When it’s complete, tar-sands producers in Canada will have a pipeline running all the way to the Gulf Coast — albeit not one capable of shunting along as much dilbit as Keystone XL would. This means more oil consumption, more exports, more use of dirty, carbon-intensive fuel.